


inhale. hold. exhale.

by qunsio



Category: Sense8 (TV)
Genre: 2016 US Presidential Election, F/F, LOL I CAN'T BELIEVE THAT'S A TAG, Queer Resilience, Queer Themes, post-election blues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-09 02:10:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16441022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunsio/pseuds/qunsio
Summary: “It’s a crap-ass time to celebrate America,” Amanita says, as if they don’t all already know it, but they still meet their friends on the roof of the shelter on the Fourth of July to drink and eat and-- try to make merry, Nomi supposes.--Nomi, Amanita, and the state of the union.





	inhale. hold. exhale.

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote half of this right after the election, when i felt just consumed with misery. i found it again recently and wrapped it up. as midterm elections come up, i felt like it was time for me to finish this thought. 
> 
> (also this amanita is intentionally a little ooc b/c i love her but i’m not fond of 100%-selfless-gf amanita)

> November

They’re scared, first. It’s their turn to host queer stitch and bitch that week and everyone’s still coming, even if the world has ended. So they lay out the wine, cheese, THC pretzels. When their friends arrive, they barely speak, don’t drink or eat. They sit, tense, scattered around Nomi and Amanita’s living room in old deck chairs and on frayed throw pillows, casting worried looks at each other, holding each other’s hands, tight.

Then, they protest. Weeks of singing, dancing, chanting, weeks of signs and marches and beautiful solidarity. Followed by weeks of no news and then bad news and then worse news, weeks of near-arrests and bail-outs and frantic conversations with lawyers, and now-- they’re tired. 

> January

The mornings are rough, when they don’t have a reason to be out on the streets. Nomi and Amanita are forgetful eaters at the best of times, and more than once Riley steps in and steers Nomi’s sluggish body to the stove, helps her make a couple of servings of eggs or oatmeal or just pulls a couple of yogurts from the fridge. Nomi can only offer a tired smile in thanks. Riley tucks a lock of hair behind Nomi’s ear, taps her fingers beneath her chin. 

“We’ll get there,” she tells Nomi, voice whisper-soft, and then she’s gone. 

Nomi turns back to Amanita, lying face down in month-old rumpled sheets. A hand on Amanita’s arm, a rough, “C’mon Neets,” and Amanita’s upright. They go to the table, shove food past their teeth, and try to remember how they used to exist in the world.

At night, Nomi loops her arm tight around Amanita’s neck, locks her legs together with Amanita’s, fucks her fingers into her, frantic, desperate. Amanita’s grip digs into Nomi’s waist, her ass, her shoulder. They breathe in a harsh staccato, panting against each other’s skin.

> April

They’re lying in bed, Nomi with her laptop across her bare stomach, Nita with a newspaper tented loosely above her head. Nomi glances over the headlines. Investigation, collusion, general belligerence-- more of the same.

“Incompetent,” Nita keeps muttering, “imbeciles, fools, shiteating asslords,” on and on. 

Nomi considers. The investigators  _ are _ incompetent, imbeciles, asslords, on and on. She knows how these go, these “investigative” teams of inexperienced political appointees, given a boon of fancy equipment and forced to follow the letter of the law and turn the other way when something  _ real _ turns up. Useless. 

Nomi’s been talking to Bug a lot, lately. He’s the only person she knows who’s breezing through this. “The world’s always been upside down, topsy turvy,” he told her once, his neck craning so his head fell sideways against his shoulder. “Now you’re  _ all  _ seein’ it the way the Bug’s  _ been  _ seein’ it.” He snapped his head back upright. “You know girly, you and I could crack this egg wide open.”

And Nomi doesn’t disagree. It’s an interesting proposition, interesting enough to pull her out of bed every morning for a week, to have her hunched over her laptop, considering. She looks into things, pokes around. And she learns: she and Bug actually do have the equipment, the know-how, the  _ time _ to untangle this problem. She doesn’t learn: if that’s enough, if she should do it.

“I wonder,” Nomi says, turning to Amanita and speaking with cautious hope in her voice, “if Bugs and I-- if we tried to investigate on our own. I know I could get into their servers if I--”

“Whose?” Amanita snaps, her general aura of depression and disgust shifting quickly into impatience.

“Uh,” Nomi says, taken aback, “the presid--”

“And get yourself arrested again?”

“I’ve done it before. I was fine.”

Nita’s glare sharpens. She exhales through her nose, pauses a moment, then says, rapidfire, “You were  _ not _ fine, you were caught and lucky enough to be a little white kid. If you get caught now-- You’re already at risk-- And other people are working on this,  _ teams _ of people, who--”

“Okay, yes Neets, that’s true, but they’re not as good as I am.”

“Fuck that. The ‘greater good’ isn’t asking you to throw yourself on every damn grenade.”

“It’s not every grenade! It’s this  _ one _ problem! I can help. There’s so much to-- to do, and we’re just here, eating overcooked eggs and wearing the same three sleep shirts over and over.”

“They've got it  _ covered _ ,” Amanita yells, shaking the newspaper at Nomi. “Real journalists and investigators and their hacker friends who-- who know the risks they’re taking and who can afford to get caught!”

“I won’t get cau--” Nomi starts, and Amanita’s mouth opens, but “--okay, Neets, hold on, even if I do, we know ACLU lawyers, and--”

“Just because you’ve got a lawyer doesn’t mean you’re-- you’re fucking--  _ immune _ ! You’d go to  _ jail _ for something like this, even with fucking-- Annalise Keating-- on your side, and then what am I supposed to--” she stops, swallows hard. “If I lose you--”

Oh. “Neets,” Nomi says. She rounds the table to meet Amanita in bed, reaches out to cup Amanita’s jaw. “You won’t lose me.”

Amanita’s chin drops to her chest, like her head weighs more than she can bear. She turns her face into Nomi’s palm. “You don’t know.”

Amaninta’s shoulders start shaking, and Nomi mouths a silent, emphatic,  _ fuck _ , and gathers her up into her arms. “Shh, babe, I’m not going anywhere. Shhh.”

When Amanita shakes her last tremors out, takes a final, shuddering breath, she mumbles into Nomi’s shoulder, “We can just-- let’s just focus on us. On our people. Our community. We’re hurting here.”

Nomi thinks about the past months, about Amaminta unconsciously scoring faint red lines down her forearms, sitting numbly in a cold tub for long hours in the afternoon, crawling out of bed in the middle of the night only to sprawl half naked on the hardwood floor.

“Okay,” Nomi agrees. “Our people. For now.” 

> June

Lito appears suddenly, briefly, breathless with excitement. He insists they go out There’s nothing that’ll break you out of a long wallowing like people you love, he tells them. So they go: queer bookstores, leather bars, museums, cafes, poetry slams, film screenings, stitch and bitch, bake and bake. Everywhere is the same-- resist, resist, resist. 

Weeks in, Amanita sits at the bar, the cool lighting doing no favors for her greying skin, and clutches Nomi’s hand. 

“What are we doing?”

Nomi sighs.

They go to a queer tea house, next, blow listlessly across cups of hot herbal tea. Nomi gets a black tea, milky and spiced, and she remembers-- Kala.

“Nomi!” Kala exclaims. “We’re visiting again!”

“We’re always vis--” Nomi wants to say, but then Kala’s braid reaches farther down her back than Nomi remembers it, and her cheeks are sun-touched as they edge into summer. She hasn’t seen her since-- since when? 

She throws a startled glance at Nita, who looks confused, before she realizes too. “Who is it? When was the last--?”

“I don’t know.”

> Independence Day

“It’s a crap-ass time to celebrate America,” Amanita says, as if they don’t all already know it, but they still meet their friends on the roof of the shelter on the Fourth of July to drink and eat and-- try to make merry, Nomi supposes. It’s an oddly sunny San Francisco afternoon, the fog clearing up by mid-morning and revealing a brilliant, blue sky. Nomi eats a pot brownie and spends what feels like an hour standing in front of the grill, the heat so stark compared to the wash of sunlight heating her back. 

“You’re gonna get a sunburn, babe,” Amanita says to her at some point. She pushes lazily at the blackened vegan sausages on the grill. “Think these are done?”

“I’ll die if I can’t eat one right now,” Nomi says.

“Guess they’re done, then,” Amanita laughs, throwing a couple of hot dog buns on the grill to toast. “Think you can wait another minute?”

Nomi nods, her head gone pleasantly thick. She sits at the low table in the center of the roof--repurposed from an elementary school’s cafeteria--and she feels her cluster, her family, center in around her, sitting at the table or beside it, as blurry and giddy as she is. The rest of her family, her community, her family of radical, resilient, beautiful queers, is up on the roof with her too, all of them at the table, or plucking at string instruments, or standing and swaying gently, or sitting bare-legged in the sun on coarse, second-hand blankets. She loves them all  _ so much _ , she tells Amanita when she comes over to slide a finished hot dog in front of her.

“Uh huh,” Nita agrees, popping open a beer on the edge of the table. “Eat up, hon.”

Ravenous, Nomi does. Nita toasted the bun in some kind of vegan butter, rich and salty-sweet. When Nomi bites down, the skin of the sausage is charred crisp against her teeth, and it releases a burst of hot oil, savory and salty and  _ so satisfying _ . “Ama _ nita _ ,” she moans. She chews it for ages, it feels like, so happy she could cry.

“Maybe half a brownie next time,” Neets laughs.

> September

And, well, it doesn’t get better. Really, as time goes on, it gets worse. But Nomi learns to deal. She spends more time with her cluster, sees despite the chaos at home, the rest of the world continues to tick on. They begin making food at home again, and Neets teaches her how to pickle vegetables. Queer stitch and bitch restarts, too, leaving Nomi more opportunities to buy cheap wine and prowl local markets for pricey, locally-brewed beers. Neets likes the sour ones, Disney the bitter ones. 

They go out more, just to walk and take in the city. They impulse-buy a haunted painting at a flea market and, while lugging it around, they stumble upon a sale at Good Vibes. The put the painting up above the stove, try to cleanse it with a sage bundle, and then go straight to bed. 

“Why did we stop doing this?” Nomi asks, panting as Amanita lifts her head from between her legs. 

“Dunno,” she says, tapping lube-slick fingers against her chin. “Guess we’re just idiots.” Without moving, Amanita flicks the vibration back on, and Nomi shudders. 

“ _ Nita _ .”

Nomi finds little pockets of happiness and safety in her own world, learns to make do with what she can get, and returns what comfort she can to her friends. Things don’t stop being terrible, and every day still brings some new source of misery, but they’re moving again.

> November

She and Neets start going to rallies again. They bulk buy poster board, cheap paint, and stencils, invest in shoes they can stand in for hours. Nomi picks up her vlogging. At a community organizing meeting, someone convinces Amanita to run for office, some city council position. She runs jokingly at first, and then she gets on the ballot and she’s dead serious. She loses-- the race isn’t even close--but it sparks something in her. She quits her job at the bookstore, starts writing. 

“Nonfiction, for now,” Nita tells their friends, inviting them to sit for long interviews in their loft. “I’m gonna chronicle our lives.”

Her and Nomi have to start cleaning again, with all the guests, and their home opens up again in front of them. They buy new sheets, deep clean the carpets, dig hair out of the drain, scrub the counters. Nomi comes home in the evenings to Nita and one of their close friends-- June, plus three members of their farming co-op, or Claud, with samples from their queer greenhouse-slash-apothecary in Oakland, or Vyn, who runs Berkeley’s Queer Studies department. They sit on the couch, fringed blankets across their laps, forgotten mugs of tea left next to a fat, waxy candle on the table. Nomi heats up some leftovers and joins, most evenings, happy to listen to her heroes recount their tales of victory.

At night, it’s just her and Amanita again, laid out on their fresh sheets with the windows thrown open. Nita traces Nomi’s jaw with the pad of her thumb. Says, “You’ve got to let me interview you, sometime.”

“There’s no reason.”

“No reason?”

“I’m just a boring computer girl.”

“Okay first, your story’s super interesting, and second, it wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t. I’ve got to write it. It’s how we’ll live forever.”

“Live forever?” Nomi asks, raising an eyebrow.

Amanita snorts. “Yep, you and me, babe. We’re not going away.”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> i thought i stole the idea for the book amanita is writing from a book that already exists but i can't find it. please let me know if you know what it is...
> 
> thank you for reading!! comments and kudos are always appreciated.


End file.
